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A work by US abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock has been bought in a private sale for some 140 million dollars, the highest sum ever paid for a painting, according to reports Thursday.
The painting in Pollock's trademark drip style belonged to Hollywood entertainment magnate David Geffen and went for "about 140 million dollars," The New York Times quoted unnamed art experts involved in the sale as saying.
The price would be the highest sum ever known to have been paid for a painting, exceeding the 135 million dollars paid in June for Gustav Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," a work now on public display in New York.
The experts, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the buyer as David Martinez, a Mexican financier, who the Times described as obsessively private and a mega-buyer of modern and contemporary art.
Staff at Martinez' New York company, Fintech Advisory Inc, refused to comment on the report, while a spokesman for Sotheby's auction house, reported to have brokered the deal, said details of private sales were not disclosed.
Geffen could not be immediately reached for comment.
The painting, entitled "No. 5, 1948," is a tangled composition of browns and yellows and is unusually large, measuring some 1.2 by 2.5 metres (four by eight feet).
It is in Pollock's distinctive drip style, in which the American artist laid canvases on the floor or up against a wall and poured paint over them, creating abstract, fractal traces overlaying each other.
Michael Moses, a professor at New York University who has been publishing the Mei-Moses index on art prices since 2001, said he would not be surprised if the reported sale price were confirmed.
"It's hard to differentiate between a 135-million-dollar Klimt, a 104-million-dollar Picasso and a 140-million-dollar Pollock," he told AFP.
"These are all astronomical numbers, but the amount of wealth that's out there in individual hands is also astronomical."
"Art has always been expensive and right now high-end wealth is really very, very high and the supply of important works is small," he added.
Geffen, 63, reportedly sold two paintings by US artists Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning, also in private sales, last month, for 143.5 million dollars.
The sales set rumours flying that the magnate was preparing a bid to buy the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
According to the Forbes.com website, Geffen is the 140th richest person in the world, with a net worth of 4.4 billion dollars.
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AFP 021750 GMT 11 06
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